Posted
by
msmash
on Monday March 28, 2016 @10:28AM
from the breaking-the-wall dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Citizens of mainland China unexpectedly found themselves with unfettered access to Google search late last night, commencing a golden age of censorship-free searching that lasted all of 105 minutes. For the duration of the film Edward Scissorhands, lasting from 11:30pm on Sunday to 1:15am on Monday morning, Google's search -- but not other services like Gmail or YouTube -- was unblocked

Yea, for all of the 20 seconds he's in it. I love it when movies show actors names on the front of the box (or give other undue credit) when they are nothing but a cameo (or as with this, a no-body at the time extra).

Fun fact, charlie sheen already got a first hand experience on a vietnam movie when his dad took with him when on the shoot for apocalypse now. The then teenage charlie sheen hated being there so much, that he got in a fist fight with his dad off set and marlon brando had to break it up.

Apparently that's probably all there is to it. From the summary I was assuming that the outage of the firewall corresponded with the times that the movie was actually airing in China and was expecting there to be some bizarre theories in TFA to explain the correlation as that would almost certainly have been far more entertaining (albeit highly improbable) reading than a story about a brief outage of the Great Firewall. Nope, it appears to be just a unit of measure for 1h 45m and/or clickbait.

I won't comment on that project, though I've heard Jared Cohen's side of the story and it's quite different from how it's being painted, but that has absolutely nothing to do with providing Google logs to the US government. That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information, nothing whatsoever from inside Google.

"That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information"everything above board and clean huh? that is why "keep this very close hold ", and let dictatorial but western client qatar royals owned " Al-Jazeera... will take primary ownership"(al-jazeera that is famous for its pro sunni islamist militant coverage of news). huh?

and why did google, "believed" "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition"? against a legitimate government under international law, and for an

"That project just collected and mapped publicly-available information"
everything above board and clean huh? that is why "keep this very close hold "

Because people freak out, I'm guessing. Case in point.

why did google, "believed" "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition"?

Because the Syrian government was (and is) an oppressive regime? There's really no debate about that.

for an opposition that turned out to consist, in terms of actual substance, in mainly of islamic state and al nusra front (al-qaeda 's syrian arm)?

"Opposition" is a catchall term. Cohen obviously wasn't referring to IS or Al Nusra, and lots of people defected from Syria to escape it, rather than to join the terrorists. In fact, I don't think the app would have tracked those who did, because they didn't leave Syria and ask for asylum elsewhere.

you "think" any fanatsay, but we read what jared cohen actually wrote in his email about "in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition".

the opposition then and now mainly consisted in islamic state and al nusra front. how do you "think" them out of the opposition?

since you work at google, where is the google/jared cohen app supporting opponents of saudi arabia/isreal/turkey etc? what about opponents of qatar that owns al-jazeera used to cover google's involvement ? after all the

and what do you "think" make people "freak out" when they get to know that google, (with likes of jared cohen basically working in both state department and google,) was eager to please state department to achieve its illegal regime change goals in syria by "helping and encouraging an opposition" that consisted of people who go around cutting people head off ( or crucifying them hear the news today ?)and suicide bombs?

Your'e completely mischaracterizing the whole thing. Cohen thought it would be cool, and useful, to help visualize high-level defectors from one oppressive regime that he (for whatever reason) cared about. The state department didn't ask for it. It was probably someone's 20% project, which Google management saw no reason to oppose. ISIS wasn't in the picture yet so the "cutting people [sic] head off" opposition wasn't considered.

There was a time when the NSA handing the data over to China would have been a crackpot conspiracy theory and the only citations would have been some sort of circular conspiracy theorist references. But given some of the well-documented behavior of our three-letter agencies, this is a suspicion that a rational person can hold. That's what's troubling here.

There was a time when the NSA handing the data over to China would have been a crackpot conspiracy theory and the only citations would have been some sort of circular conspiracy theorist references. But given some of the well-documented behavior of our three-letter agencies, this is a suspicion that a rational person can hold. That's what's troubling here.

Absolutely. What I'm questioning is the assertion that Google hands the data over. Google has consistently maintained that they only provide information in response to proper legal processes and only after careful review to determine that the response is required by law.

Edward Scissorhands has exactly nothing to to with this other than having a run time length of 105 minutes. I find their use of this as a perfect analogy to the Library of Congress, only in a matter that some will actually comprehend. One of the best headlines I've seen on Slashdot as of late.

Is it really that easy to block? I would like to hear more about successes in circumvention, and prevention of future obstructions.

When I was in China for several months, most popular Western websites were blocked - social networking sites because people can organise/talk freely, and news websites for obvious reasons.

However different ISPs (or different regional divisions of the same large national ISP) would block different sites at different times, so it's not like all of China's traffic goes through 1 single firewalling router:). Presumably they have independent implementations of a vague set of rules. Many sites are blocked via DN

Having lived in China, it's somewhat pointless, if not frustrating, to have a search engine return results but upon clicking on the link you get a site inaccessible message. Depending on the status of crackdowns, whoever wants access to Google search in China can use a VPN and see the pages from the search as well.